Every Heart a Doorway

Not the fantasy of going through the door, but the heartbreak of coming back.

Every portal fantasy asks what lies beyond the door. What Seanan McGuire asks instead is what happens after the door shuts behind you, and that shift gives “Every Heart a Doorway” its bruised, peculiar power.

»Children have always disappeared under the right conditions.«

I went in expecting something wistful and whimsical. What I found was weirder, sadder, and much sharper about loneliness, belonging, and the violence of being told that your deepest truth is nonsense.

»Narrate the impossible things.«

That line feels like the novella’s method in miniature. McGuire writes with the economy of a fable, but not the emotional simplicity of one. The prose is show more lean, clean, and surprisingly cutting. Eleanor West’s school is not a cosy sanctuary for charming misfits so much as a halfway house for children who have already found the worlds that suited them, and then lost them. That idea could easily have become twee. Instead it becomes tender and slightly savage. My final note called the book weird, full of empathy and emotion, and that still seems exactly right: it has a good-heartedness that never slips into softness.

»Outside the norm.«

What I liked most is how firmly the book sides with its outcasts. That highlighted phrase catches the moral centre of the novella. McGuire keeps returning to the cruelty of forced normality, to the way adults pathologise difference and peers weaponise it. Nancy’s stillness, Kade’s ease in himself, Sumi’s chaotic brightness, even the school’s prim rules all feed into a story about misfitting in very specific ways. For such a short book, it makes room for a surprising amount of identity, ache, and solidarity.

»”This world is unforgiving and cruel to those it judges as even the slightest bit outside the norm.”«

The murder plot gives the novella its sharpest edge, but I like that the horror is less about puzzle mechanics than about desperation. McGuire understands how unbearable longing can curdle into something monstrous.

»The things she’s experienced... they change a person.«

The marvel is not the worlds behind the doors, but the psychic wreckage left when those worlds are out of reach, possibly forever.

»You are the guardians of the secrets of the universe.«

On the strength of this novella alone, McGuire seems unusually good at making strangeness feel both precise and humane. As a person who is thoroughly “strange” myself, I appreciate that all the more.

Five stars out of five.

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‘Every Heart A Doorway’ has an ingenious and fascinating conceit: occasionally but regularly children travel through doors into fantastical words, then struggle to readjust when they come back to the ordinary world as teenagers. The book begins with the arrival of a new girl at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, a care home for those who wish they could find a door back to their strange alternate worlds. The reader thus learns about the place as Nancy, the new girl, does. I loved the attempts to systematically classify the myriad of fantastical realms along axes like nonsense-logic, virtue-wicked, etc. Eleanor the headmistress is a returnee from a fantastical realm herself, so understands her charges well. She resembles an show more older Alice who has learned to live between Wonderland and the normal world. After making some friends, Nancy is rapidly drawn into a dangerous mystery. Indeed, the speed and brevity of the narrative are its main drawback. I really enjoyed this setting and liked the characters, so would like to have spent more than 169 pages with them. In fact, I wish McGuire had chosen the more dilatory pace of [b:The Gray House|32703696|The Gray House|Mariam Petrosyan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1476844394l/32703696._SY75_.jpg|11258864], which also centres on a strange refuge for outcast youth and meanders beyond 700 pages. There are other novellas in the 'Wayward Children' series, so I should seek those out. Rather confusingly, three out of four appear to be prequels.

Quite regularly when reading YA, I find the protagonist’s age to be a slight limitation on the narrative. Here, that is definitely not the case. The feeling of being in the wrong world and trying to keep a connection to somewhere else makes an excellent analogy for teenage disaffection more generally. The novella also forms a thoughtful commentary on the many fantasy novels in which children and teenagers travel to other worlds. What if, it asks, they returned to the mundane world and had to try and live in it? The challenges this causes are explored sensitively via the small coterie of main characters. Nancy made a particularly great protagonist; I was probably predisposed to like her given her asexuality and taste in clothing. Her friends are also a charmingly odd group. I found the final resolution satisfying, despite wishing it had arrived much less quickly. The identity of the murderer surprised me, although in retrospect it shouldn’t have as the clues were there. I assumed it was an adult! Nancy’s return to the land of the dead felt earned, but also abrupt. As far as I can tell she isn’t in any of the other instalments, which is a pity. ‘Every Heart A Doorway’ is nonetheless ingeniously constructed and very engaging. Seanan McGuire has a notably different writing style to Mira Grant, despite them being the same person. I greatly enjoy the fiction of both. show less

We have all read and enjoyed the epic adventures of children who manage to stumble into fantastic, strange new worlds. But what comes of them when they return back to the mundane world of their origin. No one believes them. And they cannot find their way back. But their lives will never be the same. Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children can provide a place where these children are understood, but Miss West knows they may have to find a way to learn to live with a longing that will never be fulfilled. But can the Home truly provide protection for the resident children...

A creative and original take on the notion of what comes after. McGuire manages, in a novella-length story, to develop and present a rich world that draws readers in show more quickly and hooks them into the fate of Nancy and her fellow residents. And at the same time, issues of how we perceive and treat each other--but also how we treat ourselves--are tackled head on in a way that may leave readers coming out of the book seeing things differently than they did before, much like the children in the story. show less

IN A NUTSHELL
A truly exceptional novella, beautifully written and narrated with skill. It has a profound understanding of what it means to know who you are and to live in a world where even those who love you are incapable of accepting what you know about yourself. There's a whole world of magic and a serial killer mystery but the focus remains firmly on the emotional and social challenges faced by young people who have found the one place where they can be themselves, only to be exiled from it. This was a book that I found myself deeply engaged with and which delivered even more than I expected from it.

'Every Heart A Doorway' was a wonderful surprise. Somehow, I'd gotten the impression that it was a Young Adult, cosy, show more found-family-will-make-everything-better kind of book. I was completely wrong.

There's nothing cosy about this book. It's filled with sadness, hate, anger, grief and violence. It's one of the few books I've read that acknowledges the pain that hope can cause. It's about young people, but it's written with a mature sensibility. It's not about found-family. It's about finding the place which feels like home and where people will accept you for who you are, not who they hope you will become or who they regret you no longer being.

As a teenager, I read 'The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe' with great enjoyment, until Lucy, Susan, Peter and Edmond came home - after years of adult achievement in Narnia - to be children again. I wondered how Lucy would see the adult world she wasn't supposed to know about, and how Edmond lived with himself. It seems Seanan McGuire wondered the same thing and created this richly imagined answer.

One of the things that I liked most about the book was that there was no attempt to position any of these children as normal. They are different. They are unique. Their happiness or lack of it depends on being valued for who they are rather than how close to normal they can pretend to be. Normal is a value judgement in a way that typical or usual are not.

Nancy, the character through whose experiences we are introduced to the School for Wayward Children, likes to be still and quiet. Statue still. Almost not breathing quiet. The 'normal' world is too fast and too bright for her. I loved that she understood that still and quiet were right for her, no matter what the rest of the world thought. I'm an introvert, but I've had to spend a large portion of my life dealing with people who see extroversion as not just normal but admirable. I can fake extraversion, but it's a strain. It has no appeal for me at all. I felt like I knew what Nancy was going through.

The writing in the book is beautifully calm and precise without being cold and emotionless. It combines insight and empathy. I re-read many of the sentences, not because I didn't understand them but because they said so well what needed to be said. My favourite quote came from the discussion about why so few of the Wayward Children were boys. The answer was that boys are so noisy that people notice when they go missing. Girls are often quiet and may not be immediately noticed. It was explained that the noisiness of boys is a learned behaviour rather than a biological marker. Then this line was delivered:

"We notice the silence of men. We depend on the silence of women."

Each of the main characters had a distinct ideolect that reflected how they saw and related to the world and the people in it. I admired that these characters remained consistent and separate. They collaborated and shared their stories, but they didn't alter their behaviour to fit into an emerging group norm.

Cynthia Hopkins' narration captured the tone of the prose well. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UCJxn1TZw4 show less

I have a magnet on my fridge with Alice (Wonderland) and Dorothy (Oz) sitting together that says “I’ve seen some weird shit”; this book is my magnet in novella form and is amazing. The author introduces us to her world via Nancy who is just one of the unhappy students at a school for those who returned from places they didn’t want to leave. I was so intrigued by this premise and then was sucked into the murder mystery; there was a ton packed into this which completely worked as the tight story lends itself to continue into the other novellas in the series.

****.5

I started reading with fairly low expectations, jaded from the glut of schools for magical children who don't fit in to mainstream society. But there's a neat twist here, in that all of the kids have been to magical worlds and then returned to ours. Like soldiers returning from war, they are changed by their experiences in different ways, and wonder if they'll ever find the magic again.

The magic system is innovative and well thought out, but doesn't interfere with the messiness of mundane existence. Instead, the characters have to chart their own courses, utilizing the knowledge they gained, but sober and clear on the challenges they face, battling the desperation to get back what they've lost.

All in all, the book beautifully show more captures the alienation of teenagers, the yearning to be accepted and live in a better world, the pressures to conform, all without dumbing things down or being preachy or pedantic. It's tremendously difficult (and quite rare) to find that balance, and is exceedingly well done.

Rounded up to 5 stars for the prominent placement of pomegranates. show less

Eleanor West runs a boarding school for children who have visited other worlds, returned to our world, and long to go back again. Nancy is a new student, recently returned from a world of the dead. She's barely been at school a week, and barely made friends, when one of her classmates is brutally murdered. Most other students assume Nancy is to blame, since her world is so different from their lands of rainbows and kittens.

What an emotional wallop for such a slim book! Every student and teacher is fully realized and deeply empathetic. I can see how the worlds they traveled to shaped them, and feel their pain at being both rejected by the real world and unable to return to their others. It's beautifully written story about characters, show more despite also being a murder mystery. The only flaw in this book is that I wanted so much more. Luckily there are more books in the series. Highly recommended to anyone who likes fantasy that collides with our world. show less